A trained Soviet assassin and one of the first significant Soviet defectors of the Cold War.
Khokhlov was recruited into Soviet intelligence (NKVD) in 1941. About 12 years later, he was assigned to assassination or “wet affairs” operations. He was to kill Georgi Sergeevich Okolovich, an influential Russian émigré and official of the Popular Labor Alliance of Russian Solidarists, an anti-Soviet party based in
Khokhlov's weapon was an electrically operated gun, fitted with a silencer and concealed in a gold cigarette case. It fired cyanide-tipped bullets that would probably lead a pathologist to diagnose the cause of death as heart failure.
On Feb. 18, 1954, Khokhlov called at Okolovich's apartment and told him that he had been sent to assassinate him. Then, with his wife, he defected to the U.S. CIA. He also revealed the identities of two other Soviet agents, sent to assist him, who corroborated his revelations. After extensive debriefings by the CIA, on April 20, 1954, he gave a press conference, revealing the unusual assassination gun and the plan to kill dissidents living overseas.
Khokhlov subsequently wrote In the Name of Conscience (1959), publicly revealing many of the excesses of the NKVD. On Sept. 15, 1957, while attending a conference in
